10:20 amBefore the next round of Heat Alert Bingo, I will note the perfect beauty of yesterday evening. The refreshing breeze in the evening's cool, the sun on green trees, the coffee house that stays open to 8. Archetypal summer, which for me was 1980. I have the memory even though the feel of it is gone, as phantom recollections of other times do go.

One hot evening last month someone was burning wood and for a moment I was five years old at my cousins' 300 year old house in France, the summer of 1955, the adults drinking grapefruit flavoured soft drinks on the back terrasse looking out over the garden which to me stretched for miles with a multitude of winding lanes in and out of the bushes and trees. Adult me would have expected a ruined folly or a grotto with a picturesque hermit in it, 18th century wise. What there was was a kind of- rounded wigwam made of bent branches? way at the bottom of the yard, where there were slugs. Adult me could try to figure out how big the garden really was, but why bother? Let it stay enormous.

The soft drink was called Pschht! I believe, onomatopeia for the gassy noise it made, but very unfortunate in English.